Go Time: Dreaming Into a Social Media-Free Literary Future

Part 3 of 3 on Seriality and Literary Idealism

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If you will indulge me: We are going to take a mini-break from our regularly scheduled programming… to write about process. I will also, below, pick up the thread of serial literary fiction and its possibilities, I promise. As I’ve confessed (in Part 2 and on my About page), I am a broad, synthesist thinker, and my writing leans into “rigorous sprawl.”

Three months in to Substacking, a few writerly observations:

For athletes or musicians or any sort of performer, the analogy here is practice & training. I committed to myself (and to you) to publish twice monthly. The experience has been very much like performance training: building up under-used muscles and dexterity, feeling pain points and stiffness in certain areas, pushing through discomfort with discipline, confronting fatigue and finding a second wind.

I’ve been reminded that writing is every kind of work—thought work, self-inventorying, research, meticulous crafting and revising, physical strain, time management, emotional ups and downs. I appreciate what Substack (and similar platforms) is—what it provides for writers working toward larger projects and committed to daily writing practice. Together. This kind of practice & training was largely solitary when I wrote my first two novels. A modest public space like this is productive in interesting ways—for working out ideas and staying honest.

As a staff writer for The Millions (2009-2021), the work was similar—I wrote earnestly and more or less freely about what interested me at any given time—but with two differences: 1) I was never on deadline. Because we were not paid (eventually, in the later years, we were minimally paid), we were at liberty to write or not write, prioritizing personal projects and day jobs when necessary. 2) The readership was somewhere around 75k at its height.

In retrospect, it was a golden time: My work was widely read, and I had the option of caring or not-caring about that; meaning, I had a stable day job and was working on a second novel, so my motivation for writing was relatively pure. I had things to say about the culture, about literature, about life. I was not writing for clicks or likes, but I could have. I could also write about obscure or tentacular or unpopular topics, with little negative consequence. My pieces occasionally went viral, and that was both interesting to observe and helpful in connecting with literary community. I spent little to no time on social media, which had a more contained, less totalizing role in the culture and in arts marketing.

But, The New Old School, as I’ve proclaimed, is not about nostalgia. These are dark and urgent times; we’ve got work to do.

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Last week I worked steadily on today’s post—Part 3 in this series on seriality—and wrote thousands of words, sweating it out and getting worked up (Friday: This is going to be profound and meaningful! Tuesday: This is really narrow-minded and lazy). Ultimately I found myself in a place of circular logic and thinly veiled (misdirected) rage. That draft went into the discards pile.

In a nutshell, I am excited about the possibilities of serial literary fiction—for writers who believe that literature can transform culture as much as it reflects it; for busy contemporary readers who are hungry for difficult pleasures and active engagement; and for innovative and mission-driven independent publishers. However: I get stuck trying to envision how formal creative innovation is viable without a companion innovation in distribution and marketing forms.

The barrier—the elephant-in-the-room obstruction—to a vibrant, effective revival in literary publishing is the mass, unexamined buy-in by creators and marketers alike to the social media marketing & promotions machine. Ironically, in our hyper-linked, hyper-flexible digital age, it is as if stone tablets have been delivered from the mountaintop: Thou Shalt Package, Perform, and Promote on Social Media: There is No Other Communications or Community-Building Method Before Me.

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The new old school revolution in literature and the arts is going to be uphill, in stages, and slow. There might even be 12 Steps to it. I say this seriously because social media—most of you know this—is intentionally engineered for addiction. And addiction, simply put, blinds and dulls our best faculties and rationality. The addiction has been engineered to zombify us into directly empowering the darkness we—physically insulated, politically liberal, middle-class “we”—are all so performatively horrified by, fearful of, and partially denying on some psychological level so we can get through the day.

Before I devolve once again into misdirected rage, I will instead share some things about my own complicity and addictions, along with some steps and changes I’m working on; and invite/kindly ask you, dear reader, to consider joining me, and/or advising me, on this journey.

I’ll start with an invitation; because most of what I’m getting into here will only make sense after establishing some foundational ideas and questions.

Read books and articles by Jaron Lanier.

This series on seriality coincided with my reading You Are Not a Gadget and Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, along with watching the documentary The Social Dilemma. Those thousands of words I drafted last week constituted the first stage of metabolizing what I absorbed from this material. If you have read either book (or, I would guess, most anything Lanier has written), or seen the film, or otherwise have a relatively comprehensive understanding of how social media and algorithmic marketing have evolved over the last 25 years, you have the basic foundation for the invitations and proposals that follow below.

It’s not that I think Lanier is right about everything or doesn’t have blind spots; but his work is undeniably effective in prompting the average cultural citizen to ask the questions we avoid, to zoom out and see clearly our place in the history and evolution of digital life, and to find a healthier, more integrated path as an artist and/or cultural consumer in a capitalist society. None of us wants to be on the wrong side of history in relation to this massive, murderous darkness through which we are fortunate enough to be living (as opposed to dying). These are the stakes, I believe, of being informed and conscious, and of taking actions we can take.

But the urgency for a critical analysis of social media engagement and marketing is not even primarily about altruism or resistance. My most impassioned exhortation for understanding how social media really works is an appeal to self interest.

The algorithm makes us believe we are being connected and empowered; when in fact, Meta and Google and Elon Musk’s troops work tirelessly and non-transparently to divide, manipulate, and control our interpersonal, financial, and political behavior. These companies hoard our online data, parse our news / video / friend feeds accordingly to fragment shared knowledge and experience, exploit our psychological vulnerabilities, and fuel posting and scrolling addiction. Early architects of social media software models admit all this freely.

Take a moment to ask yourself why you engage in social media.

We all have different reasons and modes, and if we’re doing it, presumably it makes some kind of sense in our lives. Here is the list of “why”s I came up with for myself:

1. My work requires me to monitor and utilize social media in the areas of film and books in order to effectively market the things I am responsible for marketing (including this Substack).

2. For research — on a particular person, company, or organization, for either personal or professional purposes

3. I am an introvert and have a small group of friends, so I appreciate being able to observe the lives/happenings of larger groups of acquaintances, or friends I’ve lost touch with.

4. I am an introvert and have a small group of friends, so it’s helpful to be able to update larger groups of people I’m not in touch with regularly.

5. I enjoy snapping photos of odd or funny-in-a-revelatory-way images I come across in everyday life. Instagram is a good outlet for “a picture speaks a thousand words” as an expressive act.

6. As an old-schooler, I do not keep up regularly with trends. I check in and scroll to see “what’s going on,” lest I become irresponsibly or embarrassingly out of touch with contemporaneity.

7. I find it interesting to scroll through my own posts over a period of time: What’s happened this year? The last three years? What did I find worth sharing and in what manner did I share it?

Here is the list revised with some honest critical analysis. Only one valid reason remains:

1. All my work requires me to monitor and utilize social media in the areas of film and books in order to effectively market the things I am responsible for marketing (including this Substack). For other work, I don’t necessarily need a personal account to do this. But how to promote one’s own creative work?

2. For Research — on a particular person, company, or organization, for either personal or professional purposes. Non-Google Internet search engines, LinkedIn, and (gasp) brick-and-mortar public libraries are readily available for robust research.

3. I am an introvert and have a small group of friends, so I appreciate being able to observe the lives/happenings of a larger groups of acquaintances and friends I’ve lost touch with. At least half of the underlying reason here is about sizing myself up in comparison to my peers, personally and professionally. I am better off losing this self-defeating habit and spending that effort to both forge real friendships and stay in touch with more friends through other means.

4. I am an introvert and have a small group of friends, so it’s helpful to be able to update people with whom I am friendly but not exactly friends on my life happenings. The inclination to broadcast and perform life happenings to hundreds or thousands of people at a time is, again, at least half motivated by the need for superficial affirmation, i.e. daily dopamine hits. If my appearance is styled/filtered in a particular way, if I announce certain kinds of news (but not other kinds) with a certain tone (one-dimensional), if I virtue signal acceptably in relation to news, if I buy in to a version of my existence and identity that lacks context or complexity… I will be liked, loved, applauded, reposted. That sort of internalized behavior modification diminishes me as a full human and compromises my best mind as an artist. There have to be other ways to let a group of people know how you are and what you’re up to in a more dimensional and truthful way. (Even video has somehow become a flattened mode of expression.)

5. I enjoy snapping photos of odd, interesting, funny-in-a-meaningful-way moments I come across in everyday life. Instagram is a good platform for “a picture speaks a thousand words” as an expressive act. I enjoy this aspect of Instagram. But maybe I can migrate these images to Substack posts, or create some kind of independent zine to share periodically via email? Ideas welcome.

6. As an old-schooler, I do not keep up regularly with trends. I check in and scroll to see “what’s going on,” lest I become irresponsibly or embarrassingly out of touch with contemporaneity. The algorithm is feeding me a distorted, manipulated channel of “what’s going on,” designed to keep me addicted, click on things that provide more data to advertisers (and thus more money to the parent company), and lure me to buy things. I am better off proactively using a non-Google search engine and diverse news sources for a truer picture of contemporary life; or go for a walk or see an independent film or photography exhibit or sit at a bar or a park bench and people-watch for an hour.

7. I find it interesting to scroll through my own posts over a period of time: What’s happened this year? The last three years? What did I find worth sharing and in what manner did I share it? What makes me want to see myself through the gaze of this packaging and performance? See above #5: Maybe this can / should be a more conscious creative performance project with myself as the subject (Sophie Calle, anyone?), and which I can share on my terms, not Meta’s.

Sophie Calle, Calle-Joconde (Wrong turn), 2025, © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Make a list of mega-corporations who have outsized global power and take a couple of hours (the hours you would otherwise spend scrolling social media) to research their practices, using multiple search engines and a few diverse media sources.

Without being particularly informed, it’s easy enough to start with Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple. I don’t think it will be a surprise to find the ways in which your values not only do not align with these companies, but evidence that they proactively strategize to harm and destroy things and people you care about. (Reading Jaron Lanier will give you a head-start on this project.)

Corporate greed and harm is not new; but the concentration of power, and the intense, daily, completely voluntary engagement we have with these few easily identifiable companies is new.

Ask yourself why you continue to empower these companies with your data and/or your dollars.

It’s not a gotcha question, and there really is no wrong answer. The only “wrong” is avoiding both the question and the answer.

I think one of the most common answers to this question is, “Because it’s free.” A search engine is free. Gmail is free. A social media account is free. Same-day or next-day shipping for Amazon Prime members is free. My iPhone came free with my cell service.

But is it free? Consider what “free” costs you and your community, in reality. You are paying for it—with your data, your addiction and subsumed powerlessness, the loss of vibrant businesses in your community, your frustration with a dysfunctional book business & media—one way or another. What is it worth? And what would it really cost to quit?

I quit Amazon last fall. It’s bad for booksellers and authors, it’s bad for journalism, it’s bad for independent cinema, it’s bad for small businesses. So it’s bad for me.

I was as dependent as anyone on fast-free-delivery during and after Covid, and I thought it would be an impossible transition. It was not. There are independent online businesses worth discovering as new sources for your stuff; you can plan a few days ahead, you really can; you can buy less stuff, and pay nominally more for what you really need, and you won’t feel deprived but maybe a little liberated; if you need it today, spend the hour you would spend scrolling social media and visit a nearby local business instead.

Sidenote for idealists and dreamers: Imagine if book people across the country with basic shared values contributed their $139 annual Amazon Prime fee to a fund. The Internet tells me that there are 180-200 million Prime members in the U.S. alone. What if only 1 million of them contributed to the fund. How might we innovate independent publishing, marketing, and distribution with $139MM? What sort of independently run alternative network—digital and physical, online and community-based—of literary book lovers and authors could we create? What if 5 million contributed, for a total of nearly $700MM? Not to mention the instant bookish network of 5 million who have demonstrated they believe in a world driven by something other than unbridled wealth accumulation.

Around the same time, the rights for my second book, The Loved Ones, reverted back to me. I engaged with an independent distributor, Itasca Books, directly. I opted not to have the book available via Amazon. How many people were discovering my book via Amazon? Few if any. The algorithm doesn’t love me; it certainly doesn’t know me. I want my book to be found by readers who want and need to find it. Will they? Are they? Can I figure this out apart from dependence on a mega-corporation’s profit-centered algorithmic logic? TBD.

The brilliant all-knowing algorithm at work! Good riddance, Amazon.

I’ve also just bought back the paperback rights to my first novel, Long For This World, from Simon & Schuster. I am in the process of creating an e-book and printing a new edition, and will distribute independently, sans Amazon. All this I will be writing about here. Wish me luck.

(Next up is Google: I have started switching to search engines with data privacy policies and will soon be quitting Gmail. Enough’s enough. And Apple? That’s a tough one. I’ll keep you posted.)

The more troublesome answer, for me, to the question of why I continue to participate, in social media in particular, is Because I am afraid. I am afraid of losing touch with what everyone else is doing, where everyone else is conversing and connecting. How does one participate in culture and be in relationship with artists and culture workers you admire if you disconnect from one-stop-shopping connections and information flow?

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And how to promote or sell the next book, or the previous ones, without Amazon or a social media platform? Recall Anna Vatuone from Part 2: The writing isn’t separate from the marketing. The writing IS the marketing. Even after her burnout, Vatuone comes back to social media, as practitioner and professional coach, and encourages her followers to “keep it up.” She is a true believer, like so many, that the universe of social media is one of DIY empowerment and love. Have we all forgotten—or perhaps are too young to remember—The Truman Show? An oldie-but-a-goodie.

The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998)

The majority of those badly written thousands of words I wrote last week will never see the light of day (it was my Jerry Maguire mission-statement moment; though I happened to catch myself before distributing copies in your mailboxes). But writing those words served their purpose—to snap me out of inertia and avoidance, generate some rage, focus me toward productive determination. I wrote to figure out what I think, which is worth repeating to myself, with emphasis:

The inclination to broadcast and perform life happenings to hundreds or thousands of people at a time is, again, at least half motivated by the need for superficial affirmation, i.e. daily dopamine hits. If my appearance is styled/filtered in a particular way, if I announce certain kinds of news (but not other kinds) with a certain tone (one-dimensional), if I virtue signal acceptably in relation to news, if I buy in to a version of my existence and identity that lacks context or complexity…… I will be liked, loved, applauded, reposted. That sort of internalized behavior modification diminishes me as a full human and compromises my best mind as an artist. There have to be other ways to let a group of people know how you’re doing and what you’re thinking about in a more dimensional and truthful way.

I don’t exactly know how to proceed with a literary life from here—or what success can look like—without conceding to the social media machine or becoming a half-asleep zombie in service of outlandish wealth & political power accumulation by a handful of psychologically stunted man-boys.

But let us harken back (Part 2) to the concept of creatively generative formal constraints (financial instruments, serial fiction) à la the French Oulipians: If George Perec can write a compelling novel completely without the letter “e,” can a novelist successfully market a novel in the second decade of the 21st century without social media?

Back in 2009, when I started poking around and commenting on blog posts at The Millions, I didn’t know how any of this would work either. None of us really did. We weren’t totally ignorant of commerce; but mostly we were just doing what we loved. Is it possible that it’s usefully old school to focus on the work itself, let the rest follow? The writing is the writing; the writing is NOT the marketing.

What I do know: I am writing the next book, potentially in serial form; redesigning and reprinting the first book; planning to create an audio version of the second book; and newly, truly eager to figure it all out. As the kids say, it’s go time.